Get Lost

I like getting lost. No, honest and true. When you’re lost, without a set time to be someplace important like a job interview or meeting your aged auntie, you can kick back and enjoy seeing places and things you otherwise wouldn’t. You can discover new worlds—anything’s possible when you’re lost.

The absolute best place to get lost —the Victorian Shrub Maze City. Yeah, I’m talkin’ about Venice.

Jen and I flew into Marco Polo airport on a chilly winter morning, grabbed our rucksacks out of the overhead bins and headed for the vaporetto. We knew there was one that stopped just down the calle from the penzione we’d booked ourselves into. Zattere is the stop we wanted. It was, however, completely underwater. What? It was Aqua Alta—when the stunningly high tides of the Adriatic are at their stunningly highest.

Given that I rarely prepare for my trips—a combination of work inspired discombobulation and yeah, I’ll look at that guidebook next procrastination˜—I knew nothing about this wild and wet environmental deal.

So we took a different vaporetto—one which would drop us off in San Marco Square. I looked at a map, (hey, I had a map—for me that’s massive travel prep) and it looked relatively close. Nothing's really far apart in Venice. And yeah, it was way close IF you knew where you were going, IF you hadn’t been up all night on a flight from Boston after a killer work week, IF you weren’t walking/balancing on top of strung together tables, IF you weren’t carrying a heavy rucksack and, OK, 3 bottles of chianti.

90 minutes later we finally found our way and collapsed onto our hotel beds.

An hour later we were energized/fortified (Chianti—cures what ails ya!) and set out for a mid-ish day meal and exploration.

We happened on a fabulous outdoor cafe, a place I would never be able to find again—we were lost, once again. It had exactly what we needed right then—pizza. As we were perusing the menu over a nice glass of chianti (nice and Chianti—I think that’s redundant. right?), we saw a couple headed our way. They were the stereotypical Jersey Shore sort, complete with giant white trainers, gleaming white socks, oversized swinging black leather car coats and far too much hair product and make up. Jen and I started chanting, quietly, don’t come here, don’t come here but they did. They sat at the table right next to us too and ordered a pizza with bacon. When it didn’t come out looking like US bacon the couple went into full metal asshole tourist mode, insisting that they were not served what they’d asked for. Yelling! There was shouting as well as euros thrown and loud, butt twitching stomping off. The waiter, for his part, was yelling back with great dramatic hand and arm gestures. Beautiful!

Meanwhile, Jen and I attempted to look small and British, possibly Canadian or, at the very least, not from New Jersey. The waiter came to our table and, in our tremendously halting Italian, we ordered more wine and a spinach pizza. He responded to all our requests in English with a lovely you-poor-dears smile.  We overtipped. And took 12 wrong turns on the way back to our penzione. Of course.

We spent the rest of the week happily exploring and being lost in the shrub maze.

The actual distance from San Marco Square to our hotel? At most, a 15 minute walk.